[pantaloony]

From long observation: no, one thing HN is remarkably bad at, even compared to the rest of the web(!), is taking context into account. Usually that kind of thing is deliberate trolling when it happens elsewhere, but here I can never tell. It seems so sincere.

[jfengel]

It's pretty clear to me that it was sarcastic, but sarcasm reads really badly on the Internet. In open forums, it's best avoided -- there are just too many ways for it to go wrong. (Especially when not everybody is a native speaker, which makes sarcasm even harder to recognize.)